ASHEVILLE — The rate of African-American drivers stopped and searched by police has grown, new data say, despite black people already having a disproportionate number of such encounters with city law enforcement.

African-Americans were involved with 17 percent of traffic stops last year and 37 percent of searches after stops. They make up 12 percent of Asheville's population.

Now, numbers recently released for parts of 2017 show 21-24 percent of traffic stops involved black drivers and 41-49 percent of searches of either drivers or passengers involved African-Americans.

Contraband was found more often on white subjects in 2016 and 2017.

The new numbers are for two time periods: January-August data gathered by a Durham-based social justice group and a police report for July-September, the first quarter of the fiscal year.

Police Chief Tammy Hooper said the disparities were not out of line when looking at the city's high crime areas, which are places where officers were most active.

"When considering the city's top five violent crime areas, many of the traffic stops were concentrated in regions that have high populations of black residents," she said in the quarterly report, dated Oct. 18.

Local activists, who in the spring brought concerns to Asheville City Council about the 2016 numbers, praised police for engaging with the public and for offering the new detailed analysis.

And while they said they saw no immediate "red flags," one leading activist, web developer and NAACP criminal justice committee member Patrick Conant, said he had concerns over the "broad numbers" presented by the Durham-based Open Data Policing website and wanted to look at the police data more closely.

"I am going to review the report in greater detail and propose some additional analysis that might help us all understand the shift we are seeing in the data in 2017," Conant said.

Contant and other activists had presented numbers from the open data site to the council in the spring. The site's newest numbers are for this year's first eight months.

They showed a change in percent of African-Americans stopped, rising from 17 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in the first eight months of 2017.

The police data for July-September showed black people involved in stops 21 percent of the time and searches 49 percent of the time.

Hooper first shared the quarterly report with the council and then on Nov. 27 with the NAACP. The chief officially presented the report at a Nov. 27 meeting of the council's three-member Public Safety Committee meeting then released it afterward to the public.

The report was the first of what are to be ongoing quarterly updates on traffic stops. That follows pressure by activists and the council earlier this year.

Committee member and Councilman Brian Haynes pointed to the open data figures, which use numbers going back to 2002 and submitted by police to the State Bureau of Investigation, per state law. The site was created by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.

Haynes highlighted the 49 percent search number for African-Americans.

"Yet contraband is found more often in white vehicles than black vehicles," he said at the public safety meeting.

"When you read those numbers are you seeing any red flags in those?" the councilman asked the chief.

Hooper said she did not. Police, she said, have been deployed to places such as the Southside neighborhood, which has a high number of African-Americans and whose residents have asked for more help.

In Southside, from July-September, 16 serious violent crimes were reported: one homicide, one rape, three robberies and 11 aggravated assaults, the quarterly report said. That was the most of any area in the city identified by police, including downtown, which had 12 serious "Part 1" violent crimes.

The portions of Southside where the crimes occurred have 2,270 residents, the police report said, with 66 percent of them black and 30 percent of them white.

The high-crime areas of downtown have only 505 residents, with 12 percent of them black and 79 percent white. But those residential numbers matter less for the city center with its high daily influx of visitors and workers.

"The public needs to understand they can ask any question whenever they want to," Williams, a former council candidate, said at the Nov. 27 committee meeting.

Williams said she was concerned by high crime rates in black neighborhoods, particularly Southside. She said residents and others besides police need to help change that.

"We need to take a different look at that," she said. "We ask for the police department to be transparent and accountable. We in the community need to be equally accountable."

Downtown's newest position in terms of serious violent crime differs from an earlier police analysis for all of 2016.

That analysis showed the city center had the most serious violent crime for the year with 57 incidents. Some of the difference likely came from the way areas were compared. Last year, "Southside" was not counted as one area, although a piece of the neighborhood, Aston Park Tower, was broken out and shown to have the second most violence with 12 serious incidents.

For the recent quarterly report, Southside was said to include Aston Park Tower, Lee Walker Heights, Bartlett Arms and the Erskine-Walton areas.

The part of Southside where serious violent crime was concentrated had 39 traffic stops in the first quarter, compared to 56 stops in the part of downtown with the highest concentration of crime. The stop counts didn't include all of Southside or all of downtown, just the areas with serious violence.

Overall, the parts of the city with the most traffic stops tended to be places with lots of vehicles and complaints of speeding, the chief said.

The top spot was the entire downtown area with 111 traffic stops in the first quarter, followed by Kimberly Avenue with 83 and Charlotte Street with 34.

Because these areas are major corridors and see a lot of drivers from other places in and outside the city, residential demographics matter less, Hooper said.

Regarding searches, the chief said more than two thirds were the type in which officers had little discretion, such as when a person had already been arrested or there was probable cause a crime was being committed.

In the 68 searches in the first quarter, 72 percent were those "low-discretion" searches with situations such as an officer having "probable cause" a crime was being committed or there was already an arrest.

"High-discretion" searches where officers might see a "furtive action" or someone might have a known criminal history, require consent of the driver.

The data in the report is limited, Hooper said, because there are no past quarterly reports to which it can be compared. It is also the first time police have added geographic location to stop information.

While officers record that information in different places, it was not required by the SBI as part of the traffic stop information so it wasn't part of the state database, the source used by Open Data Policing. So for the first quarter, police analysts had to hunt for the location information and were able to find locations for 70 percent of the stops.

Going forward, officers have been asked to add information such as location and reason for any search to the traffic stop data.

Williams said she was "especially thankful" that police created a new form that links location and reason for searches with other traffic stop information.

"So we know why and where individuals were stopped and if consent was given for a search," the NAACP criminal justice chair said.

Hooper said the most effective use of the data is to "begin police-community discussions" about crime

"APD will continue to analyze and report the collected data to ensure the public is treated fairly and to improve understanding of of APD's work to build safer communities," she said.